There is this company that build mp3-players with a hard disk inside. Let's for the sake of this discussion call the company Archos.

They write the software for their units themselves, but have more or less stopped the development of upgrades.

In come RockBox and since we started coding back in March/April, we have pretty much(*) surpassed the original software in features and stability.

Now, people have the option of getting our free and open firmware, or getting the closed-source one without development from Archos.

We improve the value of their products. We actually make their units a better deal to people. For free. The software only runs on their products and no one else's.

Do they contact us? Do they offer insights and help on details on how things are to be programmed?No.

Every tiny bit has been researched, reverse-engineered and disassembled by us to be able to figure out how things work. They haven't yet contacted any single person in our project. I'm quite amazed by this fact.

Over at their place, they sit on their slowly fading source code with all the info we could've used before to reach this result faster. Now, we don't even need their help anymore.

Is this a perfect example of opensourcophobia or what?

(*) = we still don't offer all features the original firmware does, but the opposite situation is also true. We'll have them all in time. Just give us time.